1+Kenney+Essay+04+27+2010

Maryellen Kenney Upper Moreland School District Upper Moreland High School 215-830-1500 mk0620@umtsd.org

Oral Communications is an elective class open to ninth through twelfth graders with a goal of creating confident, persuasive speakers. The course specifically addresses Standard 1.6 - Speaking and Listening. Because public speaking can be daunting for teenagers, we work hard to foster a sense of safety and trust so students will take risks. During classes when students were delivering speeches I coached them on giving positive and constructive feedback. Student listeners made notes on index cards about successful strategies used by the speaker and gave tips for improvement. These index cards were given to the speaker.

After the technology was made available to me, I was able to use it to better help students see what makes //them// a good speaker and to help them track their own progress. I set up a Wiki space for the class in which each student had their own page. Early in the semester I filmed the students giving a speech, and, using video software, uploaded and posted it on their page on the class wiki. They were able to view themselves giving the speech and they saw for themselves what they had done well and where they needed improvement. For this video speech, I asked students to use the discussion tab on the wiki to blog about their feedback. In this way, student bloggers could re-view the speech and be more targeted with their comments. For each speaker the blog became a written record of their triumphs and areas for improvement They did not need to find index cards! Toward the end of the semester, each student was filmed a second time, the speech was posted, and feedback was given via the blogging option in the discussion tab.

The impact of this collaboration was multilayered. The ability to view themselves as a speaker was more instructive than any oral feedback could ever have been! Each student’s strengths and weaknesses were obvious. Additionally, speakers were intensely interested in the comments posted by peers. Words that are //posted for all to see// raised the expectation level for both the speaker and the blogger. Words are spoken once. The printed word lives. Constructive comments by peers were honored by each speaker and seemed to be taken to heart more readily than those same comments by the teacher. The second speech, posted next to the first one, showed each speaker the effect of their efforts to improve and spotlighted the differentiation that this lesson made possible. Each speaker was now compared to his previous efforts, not others abilities. Essential for me was the ability, as organizer, to monitor all comments.

One unanticipated advantage of the lesson was that parents could view the speeches if their student invited them by sharing the private login. Several of the students proudly showed their speeches to their parents. This ability that the Wikispace gave to me to communicate with parents about what was happening in their child’s academic life went a long way toward building shared responsibility for success.